Whenever you let up before the job is done, critical momentum can be lost and regression may follow.
—John Kotter
At this stage of the implementation, the first big events are now in your rearview mirror. You’ve trained teams, launched the first Agile Release Train (ART), and held a Program Increment (PI) Planning session. The result of all this effort is an empowered, engaged, and aligned team-of-Agile-teams that is ready to begin building solutions that deliver value.
Before you move on to that critical work, it’s important to understand that training and planning alone do not make the newly formed teams and ARTs Agile. They simply provide the opportunity to begin the journey of becoming Agile. To support this journey, leadership—and SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs), in particular—must be mindful that knowledge does not equal understanding. It takes time to achieve effective team-level Agile practices and behaviors, which is why significant effort must be made to coach ART execution.
To reach this point, the enterprise has made a significant investment in developing SPC change agents and training stakeholders in the new way of working. Now is the time for that investment to pay off, as SPCs and Lean-Agile Leaders focus on what really matters: helping to assure the delivery of value in the shortest sustainable time, while producing the highest quality. That will start to happen when you begin team-level and ART-level coaching.
Coaching the ART fosters progress in the following areas:
Helping to build and maintain the Vision and Roadmap
Defining and managing the Program Kanban and Program Backlog
Coaching Product Managers, System Architects, and Release Train Engineers in their roles
Supporting frequent system-level integration, including the System Demo
Participating in the Scrum of Scrums, Product Owner (PO), and ART Sync meetings
Helping to facilitate Inspect and Adapt (I&A) and to follow up on improvement items
Fostering the System Team, Agile teams, and others in building a DevOps culture and implementing a Continuous Delivery Pipeline with the appropriate level of automation
Maintaining a focus on the Architectural Runway
Supporting Release Management in the new way of working
Supporting or delivering additional training
The teams, especially those new to Agile, will need significant help as well. Team coaching opportunities include the following activities:
Helping teams plan, execute, review, and retrospect the first iterations
Coaching new Scrum Masters and Product Owners in their roles
Initiating and supporting Agile technical and Built-In Quality practices
Helping teams establish the infrastructure, DevOps practices, and culture needed for the continuous delivery pipeline
Encouraging and supporting Communities of Practice to help acquire new knowledge and skills
Clearly, there’s no shortage of opportunities for SPCs and Lean-Agile Leaders to practice and demonstrate their new skills and mindset.
An important note: For first-line development and engineering managers, the move to SAFe and Lean-Agile adoption can be scary. Traditional daily and task-oriented supervision is no longer required. Instead, these new ‘Lean-thinking manager-teachers’ adopt a servant-leader approach and take on a different set and style of activities, as described in the Lean-Agile Leaders chapter. The short list of coaching opportunities also serves notice that the knowledge and skills of the organization’s managers and leaders are incredibly valuable, as there is much work to be done. It just needs to be done differently.
There is no coaching opportunity more critical than the first Inspect and Adapt (I&A) workshop. That’s where everyone will learn how the PI went, how the teams performed against their PI objectives, how well the organization is adopting SAFe, and how the solution they developed really worked at that point in time. In addition, SPCs and coaches can lead the first real corrective action and problem-solving workshop.
The I&A workshop gives teams the tools they need to improve their performance independently. It also allows them to work together—along with their management stakeholders—to collaboratively address the larger impediments that they face.
For the first ART, then, it’s on to the next PI. But for the reader, it’s on to the next chapter: Launching More ARTs in the Value Stream.